Company Growth
Grow Computer today is a MUCH different company than our earliest days in 2017. We are excited to give a long-overdue update to our friend and followers with some more insights into where we have been, and what we have been doing this year!
Just one year ago, Grow Computer was working on an entirely different product, which was our first attempt at connecting growers with modern technology. By the end of 2018, we realized that although our initial hardware-focused approach would provide a great solution, we could do more for our users.
We set out to develop a software-driven, hardware-agnostic product that would provide users with a more comprehensive toolkit to manage their indoor growing systems.
Are we a ‘Hardware Company’?
It is important for us to note something that is commonly misconstrued…
Grow Computer is an IoT Software company, NOT a hardware company! But, there is a catch. Because we are working on controlling real-world systems with software, we need hardware to convert bits to atoms, and thus have a heavy reliance on physical devices.
When we first started the company, we were interested in building the product ourselves. We saw the way to our digital platform as being a consistent and flexible hardware gateway. However, we realized how hard it would be to build, design, source and maintain our own product (the Growstrip), and needed to figure out a new solution.
We had the ‘aha’ moment last December when we realized that our product would never be able to compete with the commoditization smart devices have undergone. However, what if we could ride the wave of the new products coming forward, and connect all of them for indoor growers?
Strips to Hubs
The idea of a local, centralized hub emerged in the beginning of 2019. This system would be both resilient and adaptable, tracking and interpreting conditions and making second-by-second decisions for better management of controlled environments. This product would put more power and functionality in the hands of our users, and be extremely scalable and flexible for use in any system. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we could ‘white-label’ solutions in the market.
The long term power of the “Growhub” would be its ability to allow growers to expand and evolve. By having a local computer on site, we could ensure that we would be able to continuously improve and expand the capabilities and efficiency for growers.
Lessons Learned & Changes to Our Process
While having a clear vision of our product, we’ve experimented with several development strategies, including the implementation of productized development tools to reduce the time to market.
We found that our reliance on third-party platforms placed our own product development under a constraint. As our product takes on new features and capabilities, there will be a need for additional computing power, which is not currently supported by our platform partners.
We recognized that our progress would depend on another platform’s release schedule, which would lead to increased costs to customers and limit our freedom to meet the demands of our own business.
Moving off these platforms would be a huge effort, but we chose to address the issue sooner rather than later. By the end of summer, we had committed to developing our own in-house solutions.
Where we’re at Now
Building out our own tools has been a significant undertaking. We have had to build new, bleeding edge solutions for a custom operating system, custom cloud applications and services, our own connections protocols, and many more things that we can’t really talk about, as they are now in our fresh US Utility Patent!
While it took us a long time to get there, and were ‘404:File not Found’ for the last few months, the work we have done this year will set us up to control our own destiny and build next-generation solutions into the future.
By handling these tricky tasks now, before we get distributed, we feel that we will be able to maintain a better level of service for all of our growers, and has given us the ability to continuously improve product features, and provided us with insights into exactly how each element of our platform works at a very granular level.
We’ve built out many of the capabilities that we previously relied on third party platforms to provide, meaning we’re no longer constrained as we move ahead in development.
What’s Next
We are working at the frontier of controlled environment management technology, and we believe we’re on a great track in our development of a truly breakthrough product. So far, 2019 has been an amazing year for us, but we aren’t done yet! We have learned a lot, developed our mission, strategy and plan to get there, and built out our team.
As we close out the year, we are getting everything back and running on our internal tests, and we are all planning and building our own grows again! As we get through our tests, and make sure we can roll product out without killing everyone’s plants, we will be rolling out our alpha ‘bundles’ to our earliest and most excited supporters.
By early next year, we hope to be able to open it to an even larger audience. We are excited to have representation from all of our most excited grower types: Urban farmers, entrepreneurs, homegrowers, educators and researchers.
2020 is going to be a big year! We have a lot to do, build and align, but once we announce it, we think it’s going to blow the doors off the whole market.
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Are you a Grower?
We want to hear from you!! Email us at Beta@GrowComputer.com.